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Update To FORBES' Anonymous Document Drop In Response To Heartbleed

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The days of meeting reporters in an underground garage to exchange sensitive information are back. Emailing materials without taking proper precautions is now dangerously vulnerable to surveillance. For those who’d rather not troll maps for the perfect meeting place, FORBES has an easy solution. It's called SafeSource.

In October, we launched an anonymous and secure document drop for anyone who wants to share sensitive material with FORBES. 

“Anyone can visit Safesource.forbes.com and use the anonymity software Tor to upload sensitive documents or messages for our reporters. Tor protects the identities of those users by triple-encrypting their traffic and bouncing it through three volunteers’ computers among thousands distributed around the global Internet. The system is designed to prevent anyone–even us–from determining the source of an anonymously uploaded file or message.”

But Tor, the program used to keep users of SafeSource anonymous, was compromised in the Heartbleed hack. "A serious vulnerability was reported on OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f: CVE-2014-0160, or Heartbleed," according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. "SecureDrop runs as a Tor Hidden Service, which we also know is affected. As such, this affects all properly configured instances of SecureDrop, and steps should be taken immediately to mitigate disruption of SecureDrop running services."

A fix was implemented and we now ask that anyone running Tor copy this url into their Tor browser to visit FORBES’ Tor hidden service page for SafeSource: http:// bczjr6ciiblco5ti.onion/

For any readers interested in using SafeSource, the steps are simple:

Simply visit Torproject.org and follow the directions to download Tor.

Then run Tor, which launches the Tor Browser, and copy the following into its address bar: http://bczjr6ciiblco5ti.onion/

From there you'll be provided with more instructions and a passphrase for your personal SafeSource account so that you can begin communicating anonymously with our reporters.

We'll work to investigate any tips or documents you provide so that your information has the maximum impact on Forbes.com and in the pages of Forbes Magazine.